Starting today I am delighted to announce Magnum Photos Presents, a new column where Magnum Photos, the most prestigious photographic cooperative in the world, will be featuring some of the stunning stories created recently by their photographers. We will also be looking back in time and reflecting on work from their archives. And what a phenomenal archive it is. From Robert Capa’s infamous ‘Death of a loyalist militiaman’ image, René Burri’s 1963 session with Che Guevara, Stuart Franklin’s 'Tiananmen Square Tank Man’, Eve Arnold’s bar girls in a brothel, Inge Morath's gypsy families in Ireland and Donovan Wylie's shots of Maze prison, Magnum's photographers have been in the front line of history, between them covering the most historical events of the last century.
Founded by Robert Capa, George Rodger, David ‘Chim’ Seymour and Henri Cartier Bresson in Paris in 1947, Magnum Photos was set up to reflect their independent curious natures as people, reporters and photographers, and this idiosyncratic mix of reporter and artist continues to define Magnum today. This mix shines ever so brightly with Jonas Bendiksen, the first photographer featured in our new Magnum Photos Presents column. Below Magnum presents Bendiksen’s ‘Far From Home’ series and explains his journey to becoming the Magnum photographer he is today.
Jonas Bendiksen : Bangladeshi street cleaner by Jumeirah beach, with Russian tourists in the background.
Jonas Bendiksen : Foreign construction worker cleaning up in front of a wall size poster advertising the Dubai Marina.
Far From Home, shot by Magnum Photographer Jonas Bendiksen and originally published in the National Geographic Magazine, explores the world of guest workers in the arab Gulf oil states such as United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait. While marketing itself as a luxury playground of tourism and business, close to 90% of UAE and Qatar's population are foreign workers.
Jonas Bendiksen : With the world’s tallest skyscraper Burj Khalifa in the background, Pakistani workers clean up a finished construction site.
Jonas Bendiksen : Outside the Dubai Mall, yellow-clad workers from South Asia build scaffolding, while native Emiratis walk by.
Jonas Bendiksen : Real estate advertising billboard standing on top of a slum. Many see foreign work as their only way to climb the economic ladder.
Most of these workers come from far poorer nations such as India, Bangladesh, Philippines and Nepal, and the workers often endure very difficult employment and living conditions. Often times parents will leave their home country for a decade or more to try to build up savings for their family back home, putting a big strain on family relations.
Jonas Bendiksen : Two sisters greet each other with tears as they are reunited after one sister had been working in the Gulf.
Jonas Bendiksen : Jesus Julian (9y) skypes with his dad in Dubai. They normally skype every day, when the father has his lunch break.
Jonas Bendiksen : At a recruitment agency, women pitch their housemaid skills to potential future foreign employers in the Gulf.
The World Bank estimates that yearly sum of remittances (the money being sent home by foreign guest workers) amounts to more than double all official foreign aid globally. Foreign guest workers therefore have a formidable economic impact, but often at a high personal cost.
Jonas Bendiksen : A classroom where young women train to be housemaids in the Gulf states where they are introduced to most home making skills.
Jonas Bendiksen : Workers wait for their bus home to their lodgings in labor camps outside the city. They are shipped in at dawn and work until sunset.
Jonas Bendiksen is Norwegian and was born in 1977. He began his career at the age of 19 as an intern at Magnum's London office, before leaving for Russia to pursue his own work as a photojournalist. Throughout the several years he spent there, Bendiksen photographed stories from the fringes of the former Soviet Union, a project that was published as the book Satellites (2006).
Jonas Bendiksen : Tourists walk in swimwear, while foreign guestworkers come out during lunchbreak to watch the beachscene at Jumeirah beach
Jonas Bendiksen : The fleet commander waits for Bangladeshi guest workers to finish polishing the new Lamborghini before going on patrol.
Here and elsewhere, he often focuses on isolated communities and enclaves. In 2005, with a grant from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, he started working on The Places We Live, a project on the growth of urban slums across the world, which combines still photography, projections and voice recordings to create three-dimensional installations.
Jonas Bendiksen : Maids from the Phillipines wake up in a dormitory just days after arriving in one of the many recruitment agencies.
Jonas Bendiksen : Karen Tanedo, on only her third visit home in the last 7 years, put her kids to bed during her last evening before returning alone to Dubai.
Bendiksen has received numerous awards, including the 2003 Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York, and second place in the Daily Life Stories for World Press Photo, as well as first prize in the Pictures of the Year International Awards. His documentary of life in a Nairobi slum, Kibera, published in the Paris Review, won a National Magazine Award in 2007. His editorial clients include National Geographic, Geo, Newsweek, the Independent on Sunday Review, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Telegraph Magazine, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Jonas Bendiksen : Workers on the bus that takes them back to their lodgings outside the city. Workers go to work at dawn, only to return after sunset.
Jonas Bendiksen : Nepali guest workers gather in whatever green space they can find in the evenings on Fridays, like this traffic circle.
All images copyright of Jonas Bendiksen.